Isolation

How do we proceed when every form of connection has been subverted?

Over what is still known by the quaint term, the Holiday Season, it’s come to me that the latest revelation we must face is that there are no longer any viable pathways to connection available to us.

As with each revelation we’ve been confronted with during this, our Apocalypse, it is a chilling statement to see written out. We look for any possible way to minimize the statement’s impact. “Surely he exaggerates. It can’t be that bad.”

This revelation leans on another. The power of normalcy to maintain denial and bury truth is unimaginable.

Our owners, beginning to feel the pull towards their final bunkers, have dropped all pretense that “we” share in a society or belong to a living world. Their answer to their problems have; as any such reduction of life to a constriction of only seeing problems and seeking solutions; are working on their final solution. Everywhere is now at some stage on the path to being Gaza. The powerful betting it all on the viability of some mythical Iron Dome to block our reactions to their brutality and guarantee our impotence.

Through some unknowable combination of a broader genocidal intent and the chaotic nature of bio-spheric collapse we are in the midst of an ongoing pandemic as a new one gathers strength just beyond our grasp.

The latest form of oxymoronic “innovation,” Artificial Intelligence. Proving in the simple connecting of two words that those in charge have no understanding of, well…, anything. Its “promise”of turning the very notion of what it means to be alive into a generic and intentional meaninglessness so as to maximize profit…. Removing all the “friction” from the zombie state of contemporary life so that we can swim in virtual thrall to The Future!™ While the current state of literacy falls below the sixth grade level at a time when what can actually be taught in most schools has brought us to a functional illiteracy reaching levels comparable to the depths of any previous Dark Age.

These three factors together, and without help from any of the countless other ways collapse is manifesting, including the whole notion of what “manifesting” means; ensuring that the statement above is far from an exaggeration.

I write this on a laptop resulting from abuse and violent domination at a level that has generated perhaps a half a trillion dollars worth of concentrated “wealth.” While we expect the next generation of “devices” will cost us, by the turning of mechanized destruction on the “last frontier.” The cold, dark, still depths of the deepest oceans. The barely understood foundation of the geological/biological generation of an atmosphere containing a level of free oxygen without which not only can life continue to exist; but the beating heart of our Economy, the geometrically accelerating creation of atmospheric CO2 itself would be brought to an abrupt, untimely end.

You are reading this on your device. “Yours” in the sense that you paid for it. In a few months, at most a couple of years your “investment” will have evaporated through the workings of planned obsolescence.

It appears on a “platform” intended to maximize someone’s profits while the process of making actual text written by humans obsolete marches towards its necessary conclusion.

We await in the coming days the tearing away of many further layers of self-deception as we find what actual devotees of Mein Kampf do when they take over from “normal” fascists-in-business-suits. There will no doubt be ways that things change irrevocably for the worse along with some possibilities to see that most of the changes will have been of the “coming home to roost” variety as we all begin to suffer what the marginalized and dominated have been living with for a very long time. Remember fascism doesn’t end with 1939-ish goose-stepping and posturing. It ends with 1945 style rubble-piles and pitiful scrambles to escape breached bunkers. The “victories” of fascism have always been the prelude to its conclusions.

At this point, in the calm of this interregnum, what is most clear is that so many of us prefer an active self-deception to…, well anything else. Including any steps that might change the apparently inevitable.

I used to think that what was lacking was understanding. That knowing how dynamics work would provide the tools to change our course. My greatest revelation, and the most difficult to absorb, has been that understanding changes nothing. Perhaps that’s not quite right…. Knowing “how things work” and believing that “change can be directed” are both misunderstandings of the way things work.

One of my frustrations with the digital has been that it puts us in the position of having to manipulate things beyond the glass of a screen. Working with CAD was like trying to carve a model with mouse clicks and drags instead of putting hands and steel on a block of wood.

Perhaps this frustration was an opportunity to learn a deeper lesson. Any form of intentional control is an attempt to make changes on the other side of an impassable screen. This has been a recurring lesson as I’ve been learning to play guitar. Every expectation that I could somehow memorize some fact and then be able to improve my playing has consistently failed. What I have found instead is that Grace and Mystery; met by devoting attention with an open humility and the suspension of fear; has brought moments of joy as I find myself participating in creation. This happens at its own pace. In its own time. No gimmick or trick or manipulation.

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What’s above was written in the days before the recent fires in Los Angeles. Something that’s been inevitable for decades and can only be a surprise to the deeply deluded. I expect, have expected for a decade or longer, that similar conditions on my natal Cape Cod, will end with a spectacular conflagration; with or without insanely powerful winds to drive it; as a half century of fire suppression and the accumulation of resin-laden dead-fall finally ignites. The backbone of Cape Cod will be reduced to bare sand. No escape routes. No possible defense. It could have already happened during one of many recent record dry summers. It’s just a matter of time.

As in California, as for all of us everywhere, this could be avoided. There is zero will to do so. Zero will to even acknowledge the potential for disaster since to do so would call into question everything that’s been celebrated and promoted about how we should live.

Whether it’s fires or disease, the same barriers to any amelioration are in place. To do anything to avoid the worst possible results would require an abandonment of what, clearly, the powerful and their minions will never admit.

Has it ever been possible for a fatal course to be changed without the annihilation of the structures and the loss of the lives of the members of that failing culture?

Even deeper, in the light of the way the kinds of hate fueled mass-insanities characterized by the inability of bankrupt authoritarian-isms to stay dead as evidenced by…, well just look around…. How deep does the destruction have to go?

The failure of the Twentieth Century to even recognize what was at stake; let alone do anything but fight to the death and the brink of MAD-ness insisting that “our” flavor of death-cult world-destroying mania was better than the other guy’s. A century of world wars, hot and “cold.” A century of chasing fixed ideas past the brink of any possible “reasonable” outcome. A century of subjugation and oppression, of the systematic elimination of viable life anywhere. Those of us born at its half-way mark have witnessed the way all the energy within this civilization’s grasp has continued to be wielded as a weapon in a conflict that can never have any victors, only victims. As this new century, the first of this new millennium, has remained fixed on the same ends, taking advantage of a myopic and monomaniacal drive to turn the entire planet into a machine dedicated to an absurdity. The absurdity at its…. Can we sardonically refer to its center as its heart? That all human endeavor; that the means of existence of an entire bio-sphere; must be subordinated to a system of articulated greed.

It’s easy to blame it all on the rich fucks. They have a lot to answer for. The whole system exists to amplify and manifest their pathetic desires. None of that is “news.” None of that could be considered a revelation.

What appears as a revelation is the depth and breadth of the denial required to bring us to this point without any attainable resistance.

“Resistance.” This is a term whose popularity is already rising. A darling for the believers in slightly different forms of equally destructive and poisoned ideologies. Structurally, as evidenced by the recent farce of a democratic process during which the currently-in-the-White-House-team took a W-W-Wrestling level dive to make room for the “opposing” team to carry out what the league’s owners have insisted needs to happen.

It’s also there in the rehabilitation of world communism. That other flavor of Twentieth Century absolutism that has been dormant for forty-odd years. In a world in which one super-economy still carries the name while the other one that used to be its bastion; the one the oligarchs of the West; whose lackeys and their minions still refer to as “The Commies;” has become the model for their own visions of The Future!™

Resistance characterized as a struggle to prevent something that everyone tacitly believes in is nothing but political theater. Even, as throughout every struggle in the Twentieth Century, when this theater bleeds into large scale combat; resistance, even revolution, can never do anything beyond replacing the characters in leading roles at the cost of countless lives without touching the fundamental incoherence that keeps us on our fatal track.

Our moment is unique. After thousand of years of resistance and revolution and the endless resurrections of failed authoritarianism we are the first generations to be able to see the whole pattern in its entirety. We also live at a time when the Biocidic Enormity of the stakes can only be ignored through unbelievably profound self-delusion. The one new aspect to all of this that hasn’t been clear for at least a dozen years or longer is that self-delusion at this level appears to be universal and showing no signs of giving way.

“I’d rather die!” This used to be a laughably immature tag-line for a character in a teenage “coming of age” farce. It now appears to be our epitaph.

It’s there in every celebration of normalcy.

Instead of me writing out yet another litany of examples here. Take a few moments to ponder how this might be true. Any example of normalcy will bring up a positive result. Give it a try.

Sarcasm grows out of anger. Anger is a deflection of a dissatisfaction within the self turned outwards to avoid responsibility. I’ve found it difficult to avoid a sarcastic tone in this essay. I have not edited it out. I don’t want to repress my anger. Knowing that it exists as a warning of my own complicity. Repression can be fatally self-destructive unless we allow our selves to follow through to discover its roots.

It’s taken a life-time to develop the hygiene required to deal with the manipulative abuse of my childhood. At best this is an ongoing struggle. A necessary discipline. It is also a fragile and insufficient shield….